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TFIE, GREA]

GATSBY

F. Scott Frtzgeruld

Introduaion and Notes by

GUY REYNOLDS

WORDSWORTH CIASSICS

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Wordsworth

Classics are inexpensive editions designed

to

appeal to

the

general

reader and

students.

We

commissioned teachers and specialists

to write wide ranging, jargon-free introductions and

to

provide notes that would

assist

the

understanding

of our

^readers rather than

interpret

the stories

for

them.

In

the same

spirit,

because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before

rurning

to the

Introduction.

General Adaiser

KnrrH

^CananrNE,

Rutherford College (Jniaersity of Kent at Canterbury

INTRODUCTION

The 'constant Jlicker' ^{of the} American scene

Why

is The Great

Gottb

such a quintessential nventieth-century novel?

After mixed reviews and a slow start in sales ,Fitzgerald's ^rgz ₅ ^{novel has} moved to the centre of literary

histov,

to the extent that to many readers

this is

the modern American

novel.

Gatsby

is widely

loved, and has achieved the unusual status of appealing to both that mythical creanrre the 'Common Reader' and an academic audience.

The

novel's stature has increased exponentially

with

rge, and

it

is probably regarded

with

more fondness and read with greater critical sophistication today than

in

the seventy-five years since its publication. One reason for the growing status

of the novel might be that it

was

in many

ways prescient.

Prescient, first of all,

in

the narrow sense that Fitzgerald's portrayal

of

L'**os,narcissistic;ilJJt"#d;::Lroneer'yprengured

the US stock-market's

rgzg'Great

Crash' and the subsequent Depres- sion.

But

the novel was also astute

in

its mapping

of

a contemporary urban world: a technological, consumerist, leisure society seen here

in

one of its first fictional representations. Even on the very first page of the text,

I{ick

Carraway's narrative introduces us

to

a

world of

insistent

modernity and technological innovation. He

compares Gatsby's 'heightened sensitivity to the promises of

life'

to that of a seismograph, 'one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away'(p.

l).

Gatsby's character is understood through comparison

with

a piece

of

recondite, advanced machinery.

The

impress

of

such technological modernity is felt throughout the text. Even comic touches ofren depend

on

such notation:

'There

was a machine

in

the kitchen which could exfiract the juice of two hundred oranges in half ^an hour

if

a

litde button was pressed two hundred times by r butler's thumb' (p. 26).

The

narrator,

Nick

Carraway,

will

confess that what fascinates

him

about

New York is its

mechanical

vitality: 'the

satisfaction

that

the constant flicker of men and women and machine"s gives to the restless eye' (p. _{3 7}

-

^my emphasis).

This

strangely oxymoronic 'constant

flicker'

is characteristic of the novel, and Nick uses the phrase again to describe the ceaseless glints of light on the city's shining, metallic surfaces: 'Over the great bridge,

with

the sunlight through the girders making a constant

flicker

upon the moving cars' (p.

+4).'Constant flicker'

^{echoes a}

k y

phrase fromJoseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

(written

tSgg;published

tgoz),

a

text which we know

played an

important part in

teaching F'itzgerald

about the

organisation

of narrative. Conrad's

narrator, Marlow, surveys British imperial history and the history of civilisations, imagining empire as a r

rct*ping

_{blaze on a} plain" '. Now,

h.

says,

' "We

live

in

the

flicker."'1 Fitzgenld shifts'the flicker'to

the US, where

it

functions as the distinctive srrmbol ofmodernity, of the new. The flicker of electric

light off

a car; the flicker

of

an image as movie

film

clatters through a projector; the flicker of the distracted modern consciousness.

The flickering of

consciousness is particularly

important,

and Nick's distinctive state of mind is one of edgy aleruress

-

^an alertress that is very urban and modern.

fu

he becomes fascinated

with

Gatsby's war record, for instance,

Nick

reflectst 'My incredulitywas submerged in fascination now;

it

was like skimming hastily through

a

dozen magazines' (p.

+l).

r

Conrad, p. _3o. For full details of this and other references turn to the Biblio- graphy at the end of this Introduction. 'Flicker' became a key word for modernist writers. Cf.

T.

S. Eliot, 'Pmfrock':

'I

have seen the moment of my greatness

flicker' @liot, p. ^r 5).

INTRODUCTION

WI

'skimmirg',

like flickering, is a verb at the centre of the Gatsby world, and note too how

Nick

imagines himself skimming a 'dozen magazines' (a powerful image of febrile superficialiry).

This is a novel of glancing but pinpoint details, shards of recognition gradually pieced together

into

a mosaic of American modernity.

What

makes

the novel modern and therefore not Victorian is its

alert receptivity to a culrure that had first begun to emerge around the time of Fitzgerald's

birth

(1396) and had established itself

in the rgros

and r92os. Fitzgerald was born

into

the America of the horse, gaslight and

railroad, but by

^rg2 _S

the world

was made

of electricity,

cars and telephones.

Think

about all the things we see

in

the novel, how new

th.y

were

in

r gz S ('new' is one

of

Gatsby'r favourite words) and how perceptively noted these details are.

The

r92os were a decade of great technological innovation and circulation, when many of the inventions

of the

previous

thirry

years

finally

achieved a common

currenry in American

society:

electri.iry,

especially

electric lighting;

cars; tele- phones; the movies and photography.

In

The Great

Gnttb

these discoveries are ever-present, and are felt as

new, creating strangely disconcerting effects

in

the lives of characters.

Most readers remember the novel as tremendously affnospheric, but the ambient effects rest on Fitzgerald's precise details of

light

and colour.

Electric light, for

instance, creates a strange, Edward Flopper-esque urban lyricism. Early in the novel Carraway notes how the 'new red gas- pumps sat out in pools of

light'

(p. t 5). Short, lovely ^passages punctuate the narrative, creating memorable effects of lighting:

I

^sat on the

front

steps

with

them while

th.y

waited for their car.

It

was dark here;

only the bright door

sent

ten

square feet

of light volleying out into the soft

black

morning.

Sometimes a shadow moved against a dressing-room

blind

above, gave way

to

another shadow, 2D

indefinite

procession

of

shadows,

that rouged

and

powdered in an invisible glass. [p. 6q]

A poetic effect, certainly; but what such images do is to create a repeated pattern of strangeness in the text

-

^resonant meaphors for the glamour, allure and ultimate artificiality of the jazz age.

Srylistically, the text itself is

'lit'

by

r

succession

of

bright, jewel-like sentences and phrases. For Nick's first-person narrative creates a wriffen counterpart

to

the material

world of

Gatsby.

Like

Gatsby's shirts,

th*

narative

is gorgeous and shining, opulent, almost too much.

It

is

built

around a parade of glittering effects, brilliant phrases, bursts of poeticism;

Nick illuminates his meditations with sudden, radiant images. 'A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on

;: ^*'shstand

^and

*.ll:"::Hff:llrn,his

tangred crothes

upon the floor' (p. 6). The

^surreal

lun.ry of

Gatsby'r mansion is rendered in terrns of how extravagandy

lit

the building is:

When I

came home

to West

ESg

that night I

was afraid

for

a

moment

that my

house was

on fire. Two

o'clock and the whole corner of the peninsula was blazing

with

light, which fell unreal on the shrubbery and made

thin elongatirg glins

upon the roadside wires.

Turning

a corner,

I

saw that

it

was Gatsby's house,

lit

^from

tower to cellar. [p. 5r]

Gatsby learnt from

T.

S.

Eliot's

Tbe Waste Land

(tgzz)

that modern urban settings could be given symbolic and even mythic resonance; the 'valley

of

ashes' episode is often seen as a sour,

Eliotic

contemporary landscape.

In this

passage,

that

strangely

unidiomatic

phrase

(itt

^a novel where

the

phrasing seems uncannily acute)

'fell

unreal' recalls

T.

^S. Eliot's lines:

IJnreal

City,

under

the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I

had not thought death had undone so many.2

Fitzgerald had adapted Eliot's sense of the contemporary landscape to

an American setting, creating an analogous amalgamation of the modern and the mythic. For

Eliot,

the London Underground was unmistakably

contemporary and also freighted with

^overtones

of Hades.

For Fitzgerald, these blazing lights create a similar effect:brazenly new, but reaching back

into

fairytale

to

suggest a magical casde.

For

Fitzgerald and

Eliot

the new city-scape

is

'unreal',

but

Fitzgerald inverts Eliot's sense

of

place.

Eliot's

unreal

London is

brown,

fogg/,

subterranean.

Fitzgerald's

l{ew

York is bright, even blazing, and structured around the

height of

Gatsby'r mansion

or

advertising billboards

or

Manhattan's buildings; it is a delicious confection, 'the city rising up ^across the river

in

white heaps and sugar lumps' (p. _++).

Artificial light

creates an original form of American landscape,

ikind

of urban pastoral that is both natural and man-made.

The

novel

will then

develop

a contrast

benveen

the 'natural' and the

'ardficial' through these

lighting

effects. Gatsby's

meetingwith

Daisy in Chapter

5 is poetically organised around an interplay benveen real and artificial

light. When Nick

returns, Daisy and Gatsby have had

their

chat. 'FIe

2

T. S. Eliot, p.6z

INTRODUCTION

^IX

literally

glowed;

withoufl

word or a gesture of exultation a new

well-

being radiated

from him

and

filled

the

little room.'And

when

it

stops raining, Gatsby'smiled

like

a weather man,

like

an ecstatic patron

of

recurrent

light' (p.

_57). On the next page Gatsby declares:

' "My

house looks

well,

doesn't

it?

. .

.

See

how

the whole

front of it

catches the

light"

' (p. 58).Meanwhile, ^the buttons on Daisy's dress 'gleamed in the

sunlight'

(p. _58).

The

details here mesh together,

all tuming

around images

of light

and sunshine.

The k y

question about _Jay Gatsby is

here being

posed poetically.

Is

Gatsby

a natural being, a

genuine bringer of sunshine?

Or

is the

light

he brings to Daisy (and

Nick

too) artificial

-

^a

^lighting

^effect produced by money rather than personality?

The car is central to the norrel, and is used both as a

synbol

of the new civilisation and, even more daringly, as a dynamic part of the plot. Thus,

as they drive into Manhattan,

Nick

and Gatsby notice a cari a 'limousine passed uS,

driven by

a

white

chauffeur,

in which

sat

three

modish negroes,

two

bucks and

a girl' (p. M). ^The

^race

^{of the}

^occupants

(registered

with Nick's

typical abruptress) and the luxurious extrava- gance of the car complement one another. Unsetding, exciting, modern New York is both a technological and a dynamic culnrral space.

This

is

how the novel works: through the

compression

of

sociological

or

cultural insights into the

'flicker'

of brief, flashing images. Again, at one point

Nick

complains that his own car is 'old': 'I had a

dog-

at least I had him

for

a few days

until

he ran away

-

^{and an old Dodge and a Finnish}

woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove' (p.

4).With

this one adjective Fitzgerald reveals a

world

where a young man can already own

a

car and, even more tellingly, where he can bemoan its age. Brand names are also

important - ^the

^car

^is

^{a Dodge. Newness is}

^{now vital to}

^one's

personaLity.Iay Gatsby is a fascinating character, and distinctively of his society, because he simply extends this observation

into

a principle

of

behaviour. Just ^as

Nick

would really like a new car, and laments his old one, so Gatsby trades

in

his

old

self

for

a new orre. Tbe Great

Gnttb

explores, through this kind of logical circuit, the consumerisation of the self, a self constituted of surfaces.

Fitzgerald's carelessness about facts and empirical knowledge is well known: he frequendywrote about France when his knowledge of French was poor; his spelling (in FrenchandEnglish) was execrable.

In

Ga*hyhe touches on subjects (notably, the doings on

Wall

Street) about which he knew

little

and imagined a good deal.

His fiction

tends

to

circumvent these problems by selecting sigruficant realistic detail rather than accu- mulating a mass of facts.

fu

a record of a particular time and place, the

novel is

focused, selective

and distilled: a historical

concentrate.

li,,g",da

^rejecred

*l::,,ilf;.:::"*1,**

^pioneered

^by

^a

previous generation of American novelists (including Theodore Dreiser and

William

Dean Howells); instead,

h.

concentrated

on

deploying representative and symbolic details.

It

is also a novel where phone conversations are very important. There are around a dozen moments where phones are seen being used,

in

a

variety of

contexts.

Most

significantly,

Nick

gains

the vital

clue to Gatsby's criminality

in

Slagle's aborted phone call from Chicago.

'Young Parke's

in trouble,'

he said rapidly.

'They

picked

him

up when he handed the bonds over the counter.

They got

a circular

from l{ew York

giving 'em the numbers just five minutes before.

What

d'you know about that, hey? You never can tell

in

these hick

towns

-

^{' [p. ro6]}

I{ote the

rapid, breathless

rhythm of the

speech, and

that

Slagle's commentary is based on a misunderstanding (he thinks he is talking to Gatsby);

it is a

keenly

urban

way

of

speaking, where

the

American hinterland is abrupdy dismissed as

' "hick

towns"

'.

Frtzgerald realised that the phone had altered the ways in which u'e speak and listen, and that patterns of social interaction were consequendy being transformed.

The

new conversational style, brought

into

being

by the

telephone and a

capital market ('bonds', 'circular'), is edgy, fractured and elliptical;

it

^is

also informal, marked by colloquialisms and slangy outbursts. Crucially, the telephone conversation ^can conceal as much as"it reveals. We cannot see the speaker at the other end, so inference of tone becomes important.

To

the listener who overhears someone on the phone, there is further complexity (what is being said at the other ^end?).

To

the contemporarf _t accustomed to the technology, these might seem banal or obvious points.

But Fitzgerald registers the impact of the telephone with an anthropolo- gist's eye for the idioqmcrasies of quotidian behaviour.

The

elusiveness and mystery of phone conversation is used to give a modern feel to one

of

the novel's questions:

how

do we

'know'

what lies

within

the human heart? lrTick might never know the final

tnrth

about Gatsby; and Gatsby himself misunderstands Daisy. But the novel's catalogue of elusive and fractured phone conversations poignantly and

ironically

suggest that even

in an

age

when

communication

is

supposedly

getting

easier, misunderstanding proliferates.

'In

making us a homogeneous people,' announced a telephone adver- tisement

in

_{r 91 S,'the} telegraph and the telephone have been important factors.'3

That

the phone would help to

unift

a vast and diverse nation was one of the early claims of the telephone companies;

but

The Great

INTRODUCTION

^XI

Gatshy sardonically notes the criminal usage of technology. Gatsby can

only

maintain

his

shady contacts back

in the

Midwestern towns

of Detroit

and Chicago because the telephone ^has now shrunk the [Jnited States.

To

a large extent, he has

only

been able

to

get away

with it

because he is physically removed from the places where his crimes take place. He drives into Manhattan; he telephones Chicago. West Egg itself

is a kind of glittering retreat, umbilically linked by phone wire and road to the sites of the actual criminality. The telephone thus aids and abets that

most typical of

American

fictional

characters,

the

confidence man.

Stories about confidence men, about trickery, imposnrre and conning, were

important in

earlier American

uniting; Herman Melville's

The Confidence Man (t8SZ) and

Mark

Twain's Tbe Aduenntres of Hucklebeny Finn (r885) are the most famous works

within

this notable sub-genre.

Confidence has been an important theme for American writers because

it

enables the novelist to explore,

in

plots constructed from sensationalist tales

of duplicity

and

trickery, th.

nature

of

^communiry

in the

new nation.

The

confidence theme provides a dark, antiphonal voice

to

the republican brotherhood celebrated by Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Great Gatsby

is the

confidence novel

rewritten for

the modern machine age.

Now, trickery

and

gulling

have been glven a

further twisc Fitzgerald's protagonists cannot even see those who might be tricking them.

At

least in the nineteenth-century novel of confidence

(as with those conmen'the

Kitg'

and'the Duke' inHucklebtrry Finn),one could rely on face-to-face contact;

Nick

Carraway finds himself

in

a

yet

more duplicitous

world,

where crootr<s, criminals and conmen

talk

by phone.

A fourth sign of Fitzgerald's fascination with American modernity can be seen in the novel's references to

film

and its technical indebtedness to

both

cinema and photography.

The

novel is very much

written

as a

dialogue v'ith movie culture. Guests at Gatsby'r parties include film stars) and Myrde's first action when she arrives in New York is to

bry

'Town T'anle and a moving-picture magazine' (p. ^r 8). But there is a more general cinematic

or

photographic feel

to the

text, as cinema starts

to

^shape

(however

indirecdy or

subtly)

the

construction

of fictional

narrative.

Fitzgerald had learnt from the Joseph Conrad of Heart of Darkness and LordJimthe value of a highly-shaped narrative, emphasising tight cutting and concision. FIis own novel then fused this modernist narratology

with

a cinematic formali sm: The Great Gatsfo,'s concision and splicing together

3

^{Fischer, p.}

rq.

Fischer makes a strong claim for the telephone as a factor in changing how we perceive geographical space and 'community'.

:i,.""es

echo the

urg;ff:;;.T.";"".1's

^{visual immediary}

also reminds us that this was the age when photography began

to

be popularised and domesticated. Fitzgerald generates an extended comic passage from his character

Mr

McKee, a photographer who creates banal landscapes

with

titles such as 'Montaak Point

-

The Gulls'

(p. zz).The

novel mildly mocks the photographi c craze, but

it

is also indebted to the camera. Its bright, snapshot quality (Gatthy is formalistically a catalogue of vignettes)

might

owe something

to

the development of lightweight, portable photography. Easunan Kodak invented the Brownie camera

in

r9oo, and Fitzgerald was therefore one of the first writers to have grown up with snapshot photography (he became a much-photographed

writer

himself). Is

it

too fanciful to suggest that the novel's fondness

for

avery disdnctive staging (or mise-en-scine) owes something to this new photog- raphy?

The

novel's distinctive vignettes rest

in

the mind like a series

of

photographic images: Gatsby stretching his arms out to the green light;

the panorama of the great party; the car crash; Gatsby's body in the pool.

At the heart of The Great Ga*hy ^is a central insight: Fitzgerald's near-

clairvoyant understanding that the nuentieth century was to

^be

sffuctured

by

consumerisffi, financial speculation and the rise

of

the 'leisure class'.

The

last phrase had been coined

in

r 8gg by the maverick social scientist,

Thorstein

Veblen. FIis The Tlteory of the Leiyure Class mapped society

in

terms

of

class and status

in

an era

of

'conspicuous consumption'. Veblen analysed a soci.ty that had gone beyond indus- trialism to become driven by leisure and consumption.

In

'Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary

Culture',

he wrote about the importance

of

appearance and

the

fetishisation

of

good clothes

within

modern sociery. Veblen's treatise provided one

of

the

first

analyses

of

a new aspect

of the

social

and

economic

order - ^a

^society

^that

^{was also}

distinctively American. Tlte Great Gatsby,

with

its set-piece parties, its shopping trips and dry notation of prices (Daisy's

wedditg

pearls cost

$35o,ooo),

its

references

to golf

and cinema and jazz,

is

one

of

the major fictions about the 'leisure class'.

Like

Veblen , Fitzgerald ^takes leisure absolutely seriously, and lavishes on his subject all the analytical intelligence that a Victorian novelistwould have brought to topics such as

religious nonconf"rt"ity or the rising middle

classes.

He

takes

leisure

seriously because

it

represents

a monumental theme:

the

diminution

and eventual corruption ofAmerican idealism

('th" Ameri-

can Dream').

The

idealism of the colonists and the Founding Fathers has now mutated into a consumerist ideology;

'liberty'

and the 'pursuit of happiness'become a series of choices aboutwhere one plays golf

or

what shirts to buy.

F

or

instance, Fitzgerald maps

the

relationship bemreen Daisy and

INTRODUCTION

xIII Gatsby

by

squarely

placing their

romance

within this

consumerist environment. Tlte Great Gatshy is a love story, of course, but love is here fashioned and shaped by other desires, especially an acquisitive urge that

is a form of

materialism. Daisy's

love for

Gatsby

is

conditioned by fascination with his wealth. The lover's sobbed confession ofher feelings becomes

in Gnttb

a confession about love

of

things

-

the plethora

of

beautiful shirts ordered from England:

While

we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher

-

^shirts

^with

stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple- green and lavender and

faint

orange,

with

^monograms

of

Indian blue. Suddenly,

with

a strained sound, Daisy bent her head

into

the shirts and began to cry stormily.

'They're

such beautiful shirts,' she sobbed, her voice muffled

in

the thick folds.

'It

^{makes me} sad because I've never seen such

-

^such

beautiful shirts before.' [p. sq]

And when Daisy finally

makes

her love for

Garcby

explicit, ir

^a

confession

that is

overheard and understood by

Tom

Buchanan, she doesn't

tell

Gatsby

that

she loves

him, rather

she comments

on

his appearance. 'You always look so cool' (p. ₇

). ^For

^{Dairy, a man zi the}

shirt he wears. And in a further emphasis of her utter superficiality, she then says, 'You resemble the advertisement of the man . . . You know the advertisement of the man

-'

(p. 76).This ^is surely a devastating momenq since

it

means that the doomed romance of Daisy and Gatsby is largely founded

on her

love

for

shirts and his capaciry

to

remind

her of

the advertising image

of Doctor T. J.

Eckleburg: a passion founded on appearances and the consumerist self.

Underpinning

the

leisure society

is

^

new formation

of

capitalism, driven by finance and speculation. Again, we note that Fitzgerald might have been ignorant about the detailed workings of

Wall

Street, but what he did know, he used with great symbolic economy.

Nick

Carraway, the naffator, comes from a family ofMidwestern indusuialists;

th.y

incarnate the old American economy of the self-made man, solid workmanship and materialism. Carraway's great-uncle

founded'the

wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today' (p. +).

Nick

himself works in an area far from the reassuring solidity of 'hardware'. Indeed, exacdy what

Nick

himself does, is rather elusive.

He

has decided

to

learn the 'bond business',

^

^decision

^{met by}

his pragmatic relatives

with 'r"ry

grave, hesitant faces' (p. +).

Well might th.y

be hesitarnt. Compared

to

the hardware business,

Nick's work is

mysterious, new, unproven.

The

books he learns

from

are lavish and brand new; and

in

one memorable

XIV THE GREAT

GATSBY

flourish

l{ick

compares the banking business to the magic of alchemy:

'I

bought a dozenvolumes on banking and credit and investrnent securi- ues, and

th.y

stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the

mint,

^promising

to unfold the shining

secrets

that only Midas

and Morgan and Maecenas

kne*'

^(p. _5).

This

is 'new money' because the business

of

finance is new; htrick buys books

to

help

him

understand ^a business where the rules and guidelines were being constructed.

The

American Stock Exchange and the bond market remained unregulated

until r%3,

and

Nick righdy

proceeds

into

money-making

on Wall

Street as

if into

uncharted

territory. This,

surely, is where one

affinity

betrnreen Carraway and Gatsby arises.

The

two men are 'secret sharers', complicit

in their

commiffnent

to

businesses that seem elusive

to

the point of criminality. Each man has rejected the 'hardware' and

Victorian

moraliqy of the

Middle

West. Dan Cody, Gatsby's adoptive father and mentor, is a metals merchant, a speculator in Montana copper. Gatsby and Carrawalr arc the errant 'sons'

of

fathers

who

made

their

meney from real metal; but these inheritors of the American can-do spirit now chase false gold or base metal. Whatever else he was involved in, Gatsby was, like lrTick,

in

the bond business

-

the issuing of long-term secured loans to companies and governments. Compared to older ways of doing business, the bond business, with its huge sums of money and its reliance on paper guarantees, would seem remarkably abstract.

To

this elusive- ness, Gatsby adds

criminality; his bonds are probably

counterfeit.

Money

in

Tlte Great Gntsby is inherited or derives from the mysteries

of high

finance

or

comes

from

crime or is made on the sports field.

The

novel contains a gallery of Americans, of what Emerson called 'repre- sentative

men'; but

these

figures

have

none of the

stature

of

the transcendentalist's heroes.

In The Great

Gatsby

the American is

a

sportsman, a stockbroker or a crook inhabiting a fluid, mobile, society.

The brilliance of F'itzgerald's insight, here, ^rests in his recognition of an affinity (an affinity of invisibility) benveen these various ways of making money.

And

crookedness

is

everywhere.

The rgrg

baseball

World

Series has been fixed by gamblers and

'thrown'

by the players. Jordan ^is nrmoured

to

cheat at golfi there are rumours 'that she had moved her

ball' (p. 38). Cheating at

games

might

seem

trivial, but in

Nick's disquieted responses to these stories we sense real intimations of moral collapse.

fu he firmly

says

of

Jordan, 'She ^was incurably dishonest' (p. _38). As sportsmen, stockbrokers or criminals, Fitzgerald's characters either live on

thin

air or break the rules.

From his

focus

on the 'new money from the mint',

Fitzgerald developed many

other

features

of the world of

^Gatsby.

New

York's financial capitalism, he shows, ^creates a distinctive geography and urban

INTRODUCTION

^KV

space. For although the novel is often thought of as a novel of the city,

it

would be fairer to say that

it

describes the city and more importandy im environs.

It

is a rather suburban novel. Gatsby's opulent mansion is on

Long

Island, outside

the city

itself; Ir{ick has also become a resident there, and lives in what he explicity calls a 'commuting town' (p. +). One

might think

of

Nick

as a fictional prototype

of

that quintessential late nventieth-century figure,

the

'bridge and nrnnel' commuter.

And

the movement of money is already beginning to hollow out and transform the nineteenth-century American city. On his journeys into Manhattan,

Nick

ffavels through a kind of interzorte,a post-indusuial landscape that is quite literally a 'valley of ^ashes'. Flere are the reminders of the old way

of

doing things, notably

Wilson's

car workshop (a

further link in

the chain

of

metals

that

continues

through the

book).

And

here, Nick's magical sense of financial capitalism finds its terse opposite,

in

another text about making money

in

the

United

States, the sign on Wilson's garage which brutally reads, 'Cars bought and sold' (p. _{t 7).}

If

there is a leisure class, then there is also a class outside the leisured world. We winress American society through the eyes of lttrick Carcaway.

Nick, scion of awealthyMidwestern family, educated at a prep school and a graduate ofYale, is a member of an 6lite. On his travels to and from the

.ity,

he unwittingly illuminates the gaps benveen his class and that lower down the ladder. For, although this is America, the 'new world'

lyri.ally

celebrated in the novel's last paragraphs, it is also a society marked by class and racial divisions. Nick's first-person narration reveals his mild snob- bery; he repeatedly monitors the oddities of the novel's 'ordinary people', their (to him) strange ways of talking or behaving. Thus, when he first sees

George Wilson he notes that he is 'faindy handsome' but also 'spiridess' and 'anaemic'

(p.

r7). After Myrde's death,

Nick

watches the policemen take names

'with

much sweat and correction' (p. 88).

Myrtle

herself is unkindly introduced as 'the thickish figure

of

awoman'

(p.

rT).

Waiting

for Myrde,

Tom

and l.{ick watch a'gr.ey, scrawny Italian child' (p. rB).

Passing a funeral cortdge, Nick sees 'the tragic eyes and short upper lips

of

south-eastern Europe'(p. q+).

Nl

these descriptions help to define Nick's fastidiousness, his sense of distance from the working and lower-middle classes, and his sharpened response to immigrants. He sees their bodies as

plain

or

awkward

or ill;

he notes their weariness

or their

failings. The leisure class, in contrast, are uniformly good-looking, well dressed, smart, sporty. What is particularly powerful about this conffast (to use the tide

of

another Fitzgerald novel,

the

opposition benveen

The

Beautiful and Damned) is that

Nick

himself unwittingly reveals the social fissures

of

r92os America

through his own

waspish observations.

Nick is

^both

qrmptom and analyst of a class-based society.

)TW THE GREAT

GATSBY

Fitzgerald's purpose, in the broadest sense, was to write a compressed and poeticised novel about'production' in America. 'Production'

in

the narrow, industrial meaning

of the

cars, phones and buildings

of

the roaring twenties. 'Production',

too,

as a metaphor: the production

of

people (Gatsby's self-production), and of ideas (the idea of America).

fu

Fitzgerald worked on the manuscript, production also came to signify

th.

making of the text. The Great Gatsb!,ri rtt act of literary productio", had its own history. Fitzgerald wrote

inJuly

rgz2 to his editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins, that he wanted to write something 'new

-

^something

extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned'.4 Woven through the text's intricate pattern is a common thread that deals with the various ways

in which

the

United

States 'produces': produces things, ideas, ideals, people. Gatsby magically produces his magical self out

of

the base metal

of

an ordinary

upbringng.

Carraway wants

to

produce money out of the thin air of financial dealing. America itself is produced out of the dreams of the first discoverers. In counterpoint to these motifs,

F itzgerald presents images

of

failed production,

notably the

leaden, impoverished industrialism of the valley of ashes and Wilson's garage.

For

Fitzgerald himself, The Great Gatsby marked a new stage

in

his own methods of literary production.

The

famed revisions of the manu- script,

in

Rome during the

winter of

r925, were a

vivid

illustration

of

Fitzgerald's minute attentiveness to the production of literary meaning.s Revisin g Gatrhy,

h"

used the brisk language

of

the can-do, pragmatic,

fisciplined

American entrepreneur.

Tllpically, in

letters

to

his editor Maxrvell Perkins, F'itzgerald used a lists of tasks very much akin to the young Gatsby's 'schedule'. Gatsby's own schedule ^was itself a parody

of

the self-disciplining that Benjamin Franklin had oudined

in

^Tbe Auto- btography

(r7gr).

Franklin had created a 'Scheme of Employment for the

Twenty-four

F{ours of a

Natural

Day' , and Fitzgerald ironically paro- dies this 'scheme'(written as

it

is

in

a copy of the popular dime novel, Hopalong Cussidy).6

When

Fitzgerald revised

his

manuscript

he

too became a Franklin/Gatsby fig,rte,

r

technocrat who makes lists of jobs and

then

proceeds methodically

through

them

while ticking off

his accomplishments. Thus the youthful Gatsby (p. t ro):

+

^F. Scott Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins, in Bruccoli (ed.), Correspondence of F.

Scott Fingerald, p.

rrz

5

^In revising the manuscript, Fitzgerald heavily rewrote the text, reordering the sequence of the narrative by, for example, incorporating key events from the latter stages of the novel into the earlier Chapter 6.

6

Franklin _, pp .T r-z . The text now known as the Autobiography was started in t _{7 7} r _, revised and extended between r788 and r _79o, and originallypublished in Paris (in French) in r1gr.

INTRODUCTION

Rise from

bed 6.oo

^A.M.

Dumbbell exercise and

wall-scaling

^6.t

_5-6.3o

^,,

Study electricity, etc

.

7. r 5-8. ^r

5

^,,

Work ^8.3o-4.3o

^P.M.

Baseball and

sports _4.3o-5.oo

^,,

Practise elocution, poise and how to attain

it _5.oo-6.oo

^,,

Study needed

inventions _7.oo-9.oo

^,,

Note how two of the

k.y

activities are technological: 'Srudy electricjty', 'Study needed inventions'. Fitzgerald's approach to writing was similarly technocratic, brisk and compartmentalised, and similarly boastful about 'labor' and 'uninterrupted work':

Dear

Max - ^After

^{six weeks}

^of unintelrupted work the proof

is finished and the last

ofit

goes to you this afrernoon. On the whole it's been very successful labor.

(t)

I've brought Gatsby to

life.

^.

(r)

I've accounted for his money

G)

^f've fixed up the two weak chapters (vr and vtl).

(+)

I've improved his

first pary.

(S)

I've broken up his long narrative

in

Chapter vIII.7

The

series of letters to Maxwell Perkins, and later letters to his wife Zelda, reveal Fitzgerald's obsessive interest

in

every aspect of making, producing and selling ^a work of literature. At the time of his death, as he worked

on the

unfinished manuscript

of

The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald claimed

in

a very

telling

phrase that he wanted

to write

^(a constntaed

novel like

Gatsh1l .8

This 'constnrction' had

manifested

itself in

the celebrated series

of

^letters

to

^Perkins

during rg2+ and rgz1

when Fitzgerald had repeatedly considered and revised his manuscript, polish- ing and perfecting a text that he had claimed at first was 'about the best American novel ever

written'.

When he wTote this sentence to Perkins around z7 August rgz4,Fitzgerald had still to undertake a momentous series of revisions that would radically focus the text, and ^{he was}

fiddling with

the

tide

of his novel (he also admitted that the novel was 'rough

stuffin

places').e FIe proclaimed the novel's greauless, but continued to hone his literary product. FIis indecision about the title is another sign

of this

machine-tooled perfectionism: Fitzgerald wanted

his text to

be

F. Scott Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins, c.r8 Febnr^ry r925, in Turnbull (ed.), Letters, p. r77

Letter toZelda Fitzgerald, z3 October rg+o, in Turnbull, p. rz8

XWI

il,".-o

correctry,

ro;:t:Jt"J:,t:il'.T* ^arure,

^{mystery and}

glamour

of

Gatsby as he sands on his tefface. Fitzgerald played

with

tides such as Trimalcbio, On the Road to West Egg, Gold-haned Gatshy, Tbe High-boancing Loaer.l0

What

unites these tides (and the early working tide, ^(Jnder the Red, White and Blue) is their catchiness

-

^{a seductive blend} of the enigmatic and the enticing.

Intriguingly,

Fizgerald was to admit that the tide he finally chose was in a sense inaccurot€: 'The Ctreat Gatshy is weak because there's no emphasis even ironically on his greafiless

or

lack of it. Flowever let

it

pass.' But, of course, the

title

achieves its effect

not in

terms

of logic but

because

of its

alliterative, snappy quality.

It

sounds like the tide of one of

the

early pop songs that are alluded to

in

the novel, nrnes

to which

one imagines Gatsby'r guests danced.

The

alliteration,

with

its logo-like

immediaq,

fits neady

into

a world where

Myrtl.

reads a magazine

with

a similarly

j^rry

name, Town Tanle. Tlte Great Gatrby seems apposite,

utterly right,

because

rhythmically

and tonally,

it

marks our entry to a world where magazines like Tram Tanle

are

objects

of

desire.

And at the

same

time, the tide

powerfrrlly foregrounds Gatsby's remaking

of

himselfi he has altered

the

harsh immigrant name Ga:rz

to

the melodious Gatsby.

Identity

is plastic and can be remade or rebranded.

The Great Gatshy is a novel about production, and it has also served as

an example to later producers: the twentieth-century US novelists who are clearly

working within the territory

^mapped

by

Fitzgerald.

For

contemporary authors such as

Don Delillo,

Thomas Pynchon and

Brett Easton Ellis, the glinting

surfaces

of America continue

to fascinate ('the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines grves

to the

resdess eye').

For all

these

writers,

the superficial things of modern life

ftrand

names, television, cars) possess paradoxical

depths. Fitzgerald's technological brio is echoed in

Thomas

ftmchon's

^famous comparison between highways and radio circuits

inThe

Crying of Lot 4gG966):

'The

ordered swirl of houses and streets,

from this high angle,

sprang

at her now with the

same unexpected,

astonishing clarity as the circuit card had.'ll Don Delillo's

White Noise

(tq8+)

opens

with

a

riveting list of

consumer goods, a compendium

which

surreally recapinrlates Ga*by's sense

of plenitude: 'fhe junk food still in

shopping

brp -

onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut crdme patties, Waffelos and KabooffiS,

ftuit

Letter to Maxwell Perkins, 'before 27 August t9z4', in Turnbull, p.

fi6

Letter to Maxwell Perkins, _{d. 7} November rgz4, in Turnbull, p. 169 Smchon, p. r4

9 IO II

INTRODUCTION

XIx chews and toffee popcorn;

the Dum-Dum

pops,

the

mystic mints.'

Delillo's

narrator, Jack Gladney, ^says, in words that one can imagine

Nick

Carraway using,

that this

is a 'spectacle':

'It's

a

brilliant

event, invariably.'rz

In his

care

for detail, and his

desire

to improve

his product, Fitzgerald was every

bit

^{as much} an American producer

of

goods as was FIenry Ford, the automobile manufacturer. And, like an early

Ford

car,

the

status

of

The Great

Gnttb

rests

not only in

its technological acumen, but in its exempl^ry resonance for later produc- ers: the writers who continue to read the

United

States as the

'brilliant

event', invariably and recurrendy.

Guv RrnrvoLDS Rutherford College (Jniaersity _of Kent at Canterbary

rz

^{Delillo, p.} 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bibliography

MamhewJ. Bruccoli,

F.

Scon Fitzgerald:

A

Desriptiue Bibliog'aphy, revised edition, University of Pittsburgh Press rg87

Andrew

T.

Crosland,

A

Concordance to

F.

Scott Fitzgernld's 'The Great Gatsby', Gale/Bruccoli/Clark,

Detroit

_{r 97 S}

Linda C. Stanl.y, The Foreign Critical Repatation of F. Scott Fitzgerald:

An Anabtit and, Annotated Biblilg'aphy, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut ^r g8o

Biography and Corcespondence

MatthewJ. Bruccoli and Margaret

M.

Duggan (eds) , Correspondence

of

F.Scott Fitzgernld,Random Flouse, New

York

r98o

MatthewJ. Bruccoh, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: Tbe Life 0f F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New

York

r 98 r

MatthewJ.

Bruccoli (ed.),

F.

Scott Firzgerald:

A

Ltfe in Letters,

Scribner's, New

York

rgg4

Scott Donaldson, Fool

for

^{Laae: F. Scott} Fitzgerald, Congdon and Weed,

I{ew York

1983

John Kuehl ^and Jactr<son R. Bryer (eds), Dear Scott/Dear Max: Tlte Fitzger"ald-Perkins Coru"espondence, Scribner's, New

York

rg7 r Henry Dan Piper, F. Scon Fitzgeratd,:

A

Criticnl Portrair,

Holt,

Rinehart

and Winston,

I{ew York

:1965

Andrew

Turnbull

(ed.), The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Scribner's Sons, New

York

1963

Andrew

Turnbull,

S'con Fitzgerald, Scribner's, New

York

_ry62 Andr6 Le

Vot, F.

Scott Fitzgerald:

A

Biograpby,

o. William

Byron,

Double day,Irtrew

York

1983

Critical

Stud,ies and Colleaions of Essays; Otber Works

Joan

M.

Nle n, Candles and, Camiual Lights: Tbe Catholic Se:nsibility

0f

F. Scon Fitzger"a/d, New York University Press, rg78

BIBLIOGRAPHY

XXI Ronald Berman, 'The Great Gatsby' and Fitzgerald's World of ldeas,

University of Alabama ^Press, Tuscaloosa and

London

rgg7 Ronald

Berman,

'The Great Garcby' and Modern Times, University

of

Illinois

Press, Urbana and Chicago

rgg4

Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations: F. Scon Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby', Chelsea House, New

York ry86

MatthewJ. Bruccoli (ed.), I{Ew F,ssays on'Tbe Great Gntsby', Cambridge University Press, 1985

Jackson R. Bryer (ed.), F. Scon Fingerald: The Critical Repatation,Bvrt Franklin, New

York

1978

John F. Callahan, The lllusions oJ- a l{ation: Myth and History in the Ir{oaels 0f

F.

Scott Fitzgerald,lJniversity of

Illinois

Press, tJrbana r97 2

Johr

B. Chambers, The lJoaels 0f

F.

Scott Fitzgerald,

StMartin's

Press, New

York _ry89

FIenry Claridge (ed.), F. Scott Fitzgernld: Critical Assessunents,4 vols,

Helm

Information, Robertsbridge, East Sussex

rygz

Joseph Conrad, Heart ^of Darknesq Penguin,

London

1983

Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Returvt:

A

Literary Odyssey of the rg2os)Viking Press, New

York

r95 r

Don Delillo,White

l{oise, Picador,

London

1986

Scott Donaldson (.d.), Critical hsays on

F.

Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Grent Gatsby', G.

K. Hall,

Boston

ry8q

Kenneth Eble _, F. Scon Fhzgerald, second edition, Twayne, Boston rg7 ₇

T.

^S.

Eliot,

Tbe Comphte Poems and Plays 0f T. S. Eliot, Faber, London

ry6s

Claude S. Fischer, America Calling:

A

Socinl History af the Telephone to

r94o, University of California Press, Berkeley

rygz

Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, edited byJ.

e.

Leo Lemay and P.

M.

Zall,

Norton,

New York and

London

1986 FrederickJ. Hoffrn an, Tbe Tbenties: American Writing itz the Posruar

Decade,

Viking

^Press, New

York

196z

Andrew Flook,

F.

Scon Fitzgerald,,Edward Arnold, London and

l{ew York

rggz

Nfred

Kazin (ed.), F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His

Work,World

Publishing, Cleveland r g1r

XXII THE GREAT

GATSBY

A.

Robert Lee

(.d.), F. Scon Fitzgerald: The Promises of

Lrft,

Vision Press,

London

_ryBg

Richard Lehan,

E

^Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiaioz, Southern

Illinois

University Press, Carbondale,

Illinois

_ry66

Ernest FI. Lockridge (ed.), Tzuentietb-Century Interpretations of 'The Great Gatshy':

A

Collertion af Critical Essays, Prentice-Flall, Englewood Cliffs, NewJersey 1968

Robert Emmet _{Long ,} The Achieaing of 'Tlte Great

Gott\':

F. Scon Fitzgerald, r g zo-r g 2 J t Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania ^r g7g

Stephen Matterson, Tlte Great Gatsby,Macmillan,

London

rggo

Walter

Benn Michaels, Our Arnerica: I{atiaisrn, Modernism, and

Pluralivrn, Duke University Press, Durham and

London

_rygS James E.

Miller,

_Jr,

F.

Scott Fitzgerald: His

Art

and His Tecbniqzze, New

York Llniversity Press 196+

Thomas Pynchon, Tlte

Cry*g

of Lot 49,Yrntage,

London ry96

Robert Roulston and Helen

H.

Roulston, The Winding ^Road to West

EggTlte Arcinic Deaehpment ^of F. Scon Fingerald,Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania ^r gg5

Dan Serter, Image Patte?ns in the t{oaels 0f

F.

Scott Fitzgerald,

UMI

Research Press, Ann

Arbor

1986"

Milton

R. Stern, The Golden Mament: The lr{oaeb of F. Scott Fitzgerald, University of

Illinois

Press, Urbana rg7o

Thorstein Veblen, Tlte Theory of the Leirure Class, Dover, New

York r994

Brian Way, F. Scon Fitzgerald and the

Art

of Social Fiaion, Edward Arnold,

London

r98o

.xHS.LVD .LV:.nID :.IH.L

Then wear the golden hat, if that will move her;

If

you can bounce high, bounce for her too,

Till she cry, 'Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!'

THOMAS PARKE n'INVILLIERS

Cbapter r

Ix My

youNGER and more rrulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been nrrning over in my mind ever since.

'Whenever you feel like criticising anyone,' he told

^ffie

,

^'just

remember that all the people

in

this

world

haven't had the advantages that you've had.'

He didn't

say any more, but we've always been unusually communi- cative

in

a reserved way, and

I

understood that he meant a great deal more than that.

In

consequence,

I'm

inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the

victim

of not a few veteran bores.

The

abnormal mind is quick

to

detect and attach itself

to

this quality when

it

appears

in

a normal person, and so

it

came about that

in

college

I

was unjusdy accused

of being a politician,

because

I

^{was prirry}

to the

secret grrefs

of

wild, unknown men.

Most

of the confidences were unsought

-

frequently

I

have feigned sleep, preoccupation or a hostile levity when

I

realised by some unmistakable sign

that

an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon;

for

the intimate reveladons of young men,

or

at least the terrns

in

which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgements is a matter

of infinite

hope.

I

am still a

little

afraid of missing something

if I

forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and

I

snobbishly repeat, a sense

of

the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance,

I

come to the admission that

it

has a

limit.

Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes,

but

after a certain

point I don't

care what

it's

founded on.

When I

came back

from

the East last aunrmn

I felt

that

I

wanted the

world to

be

in uniform

and

at

a

sort of moral attention for

ev€f;

I

wanted

no

more riotous excursions

with

privileged glimpses

into

the human heart.

Only

Gatsby,

th.

man who gives his name

to

this book, was exempt

from my

reaction

-

^Gatsby,

^who

represented everything

for which I

have an unaffected scorn.

If

personality

is

an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about

hi*,

some heightened sensitivity

to

the promises

of life,

as

if

he were related to one of those intricate machinesl that register earthquakes ten fhousand miles away.

This

responsiveness had nothing

to

do

with

that

flabby

impressionability

which is dignified under the

name

of

the 'creative

temperarnent' it

was

an

extraordinary

gift for hope,

a

4 ^{THE GREAT}

^GATSBY

romantic readiness such as

I

have never found

in

any other person and which

it

is not likely

I

shall ever find again.

No -

^Gatsby turned out all

right

at the end;

it

is what preyed on Gatsby, what

foul

dust floated

in

the wake

of

his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest

in

the abordve soffows and short-winded elations of men.

My family

have been

prominent, well-to-do

people

in this Middle

Western ctry

for

three generations.

The

Carraways are something of a

clan, and we have a

tradition

that we're descended

from

the Dukes

of

Buccleuch,2

but the

actual founder

of my line

was

my

grandfather's brother, who came here

in

fifty-one, sent a substitute to the

Civil

War, and starced the wholesale hardware business that

my

father carries on today.

I

never saw this great-uncle, but

I'm

supposed to look like him

- ^with

special reference

to the rather hard-boiled painting that

hangs

in

father's office.

I

graduated from New Flaven3

in _ryr

_S, just a quarter

of

a century afrer my father, and a litde later

I

participated in that delayed

Teutonic migration

known as the Great

War. I

enjoyed the counter raid so thoroughly that

I

came back resdess. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe

-

^so

^I

^decided

^to

^go East and learn the bond business.

Everybody

I

knew was

in the

bond business, so

I

supposed

it

could support one more single man.

Nl

my aunts and uncles talked

it

over as

if

they were choosing a prep school

for

ffie, and

finally

said,

'Why -

ye-es,'with very $ave, ^{hesitant faces.} Father agreed to finance me for a

year, and after various delays

I

came East, perrnanently,

I

thought,

in

the spring of twenty-two.

The

practical thing was to

find

rooms

in

the

.ity,

but

it

was a warm season, and

I

had just left a counfiry of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a

commutirg

town,

it

sounded like a great idea. He found the house,

a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last

minute the firm

ordered

him to

Washington, and

I went out to

the country alone.

I

had a dog

-

^{at least}

^I

^had

^{him for}

^{a few days}

^until

^he

ran away

-

^{and an old} Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It

was

lonely for

a

d^y or

so

until

one

morning

some man, more recendy arrived than

I,

stopped me on the road.

'F{ow do you get to West Egg village?' he asked helplessly.

I

told him. And as

I

walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a

pathfinder, an

original

settler.

He

had casually conferred

on

me the

THE GREAT GATSBY

₅

freedom of the neighbourhood.

And so

with

the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on

the

^trees,

just as things grow in ^fast

^movies,

I had that

familiar conviction that life was beginning over again

with

the summer.

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down

out of

the young breath-Sving air.

I

bought

a

dozen volumes

on bankirg

and

credit

and investrnent securities,4 and

th"y

stood

on my

shelf

in red

and

gold like

new money

from the

mint, promising

to unfold

the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenass knew.

And I

had the

high intention of

reading many other books besides.

I

was rather literary in college

-

^{one year. I wrote a}

series

of

very solemn and obvious editorials

for the

Yale l{mss

-

^and

now

I

was going to bring back all such things

into

my life and become again that most

limited

of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man'.

This

isn't just an epigram

-

^{life is much more} successfully looked at

from

a

single window, after all.

It

was a matter of chance that

I

should have rented a house

in

one

of

the strangest communities

in North

America.

It

was

on that

slender riotous island which extends itself due east of

New York -

^{and where}

there arq

among other natural curiosities,

two

unusual formations

of

land.

Twenty

miles

from

the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical

in

contour and separated

only by r

courteqy bay,

jut out into

the most domesticated body of salt water

in

the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard

of Long

Island Sound.

They

are

not

perfect ovals

-

^like

the

egg

in the

Columbus

stolf,6 th.y

are

both

crushed

flat at

the contact

end but their

^physical resemblance

must be a

source

of

perpetual wonder to

th.

golls that fly overhead.

To

the wingless a more interesting phenomenon is their dissimilarity

in

every particular except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the - ^{well, the}

less fashionable

of the

two, though this is a most superficial tag

to

express the bizarre and

not

a

little

sinister contrast benveen them.

My

^house was at the very

tip of

the egg,

onll fifty

yards

from the

Sound, and squeezed bennreen two huge places that rentedT

for

twelve

or

fifteen thousand a season.

The

one on my

i{ght

was a colossal affair

by

any standard

- ^it

^{was a factual}

imitation of

some

H6tel

de

Ville in

Normandy,

with

a tower

on

one side, spanking

new under a thin

beard

of raw ioy, and a

marble swimming pool, and more than

forty

acres of lawn and garden.

It

^was

Gatsby's mansion.

Or,

rather, as

I didn't

know

Mr

Gatsby,

it

was a mansion, inhabited

by,

gendeman of that name.

My

own house was an eyesore, but

it

was a small eyesore, and

it

had been overlooked, so

I

had a view

of

the water, a partial

view of my

neighbour's lawn, and the